This is very true. It is a real issue in the open source world. http://github.com/codegangsta/martini tries to pride itself on minimalism. Thankfully the modularity of the project allows me to tell people to add features via other packages and repositories. Even though the product is solid it is difficult to communicate that the project is still active without having so many commits.
This is one of the reasons that I find the Golang package management philosophy refreshing in theory. "Master should never break" really prevents feature creep from coming in and promotes the use of solid packages that aren't always being actively worked on. Of course there are some major drawbacks wrt lack of versioning in Go, but I think the philosophy there overall is a very good thing for open source development.
Incredibly, people seem receptive to overly ambitious feature-creep-laden libraries even if they're completely half-baked. It's like they'd rather debug someone else's code than write it properly in the first place. IMO, there's few things more painful than when someone's library just doesn't work at all. The 'shiny' factor of communities usually indicates a lack of respect for good engineering. I much prefer communities that take coupling seriously; the only one I've found so far seems to be Clojure.
Please continue to push Golang away from fashion-oriented 'engineering.' I hope you take marketing seriously; it seems very possible for someone to create the next ultra-coupled-hack-of-a-Go-framework to rile everyone up and consequently forget all the lessons of minimalism.
This is one of the reasons that I find the Golang package management philosophy refreshing in theory. "Master should never break" really prevents feature creep from coming in and promotes the use of solid packages that aren't always being actively worked on. Of course there are some major drawbacks wrt lack of versioning in Go, but I think the philosophy there overall is a very good thing for open source development.